Thursday, 14 February 2013

The Evolution of Identity

Here's my February column for AVENUE magazine. Photography this month is by Annough Lykin.

Recently on my blog I published a short extract from the new
novel I’ve been working on, ‘AFK, Again’. In the extract, Second Life® private
investigator Definitely Thursday reflects on the various categories of avatar
profile she’s encountered over the years, these including the Empty Profile
(EP), the Aggressive Profile (AP), the Somebody Else’s Quotations Profile
(SEQP), the In Love Profile (ILP), the Promotional Profile (PP) and still more.
For example:

“The Poetry Profile (PoP) attempts to map out the personality of the
resident in picks via a selection of poems; subsets of this category are the
Rhyming Poetry Profile (RPoP) and the Own Poetry Profile (OPoP).”

My own profile’s a mixture of promotional picks (please
visit my website, please buy my books; that sort of thing) and references to a
few significant SL friendships. It’s pretty static – I rarely update it – and
it contains, I have to admit, a quotation from somebody else – Stephen Fry, who
once wrote, "You have no idea where I am as I do this, and I have no idea
who, where or what you are as you continue to read. We are connected by a
filament of language that stretches from somewhere inside my brain to somewhere
inside yours." He was referring to the relationship he had as a writer to
his readers, which is why I personally have selected it, but I also think it’s a
beautiful summary for the way we conduct our textual interactions in the
metaverse.

Perhaps it seems like stating the bleeding obvious to say
that our lives are becoming increasingly digital, but I don’t think society as
a whole has yet grasped the larger ramifications of this. As the media gets
itself all tied up in debates over privacy and the real life social cost of
excessive amounts of time spent online, the issue of digital identity seems to
have gone largely unexamined. The elderly throw their arms up in despair at the
sheer ridiculousness of it all; the middle aged embrace it, but at the
‘bolt-on’ level where online interaction is an occasional additional social
layer; the young, meanwhile, are living it: to them, the online world is
increasingly interwoven with the offline world and where the one meets the
other is becoming more and more blurred. I’m generalising, of course. And I’m
certainly not suggesting that the young have got it right. I belong to the
middle category and, whilst I’m undeniably just a little bit in love with some
of the possibilities that online interaction offers, I’m also mindful that
human beings have evolved to be with other human beings physically: it’s in our nature; it’s primal; it’s how we’re meant
to be. The thing is, social trends are entities in their own right and pay
little attention to such socio-biological truths. And, barring some big,
unforeseen event that sends everyone fleeing from their computers in terror, we
are now a long way past the point of no return to a non-digital way of
existence. One could, of course, argue that our mission must be to escape the
limitations imposed on us by evolution and biology, and that digital identity
is one such escape route.

Evolution is fickle beast, full of apparent contradiction.
It’s left us with predispositions and mechanisms that are both helpful and
unhelpful in our modern age. On the one hand, we’ve evolved to live in groups and
therefore survival of the fittest group has perhaps been a more important
shaping factor to our genes than survival of the fittest individual over recent
millennia. We know, for example, that hostility is a trait that leads to an
increased risk of heart attack and it’s been suggested by means of an
explanation for this that hostile people would have had a corrosive effect on hunter-gatherer
tribe strength such that their death would ultimately be beneficial. We know
that women tend to live longer than men, perhaps because their ability to care
for the young in a tribe – ie, to continue to contribute – outlasted a man’s
ability to hunt. There is also an emerging school of thought that a having
different types of thinkers in your tribe would have been advantageous. The
people we today diagnose as having ADHD could back then have been thought of as
the fast hunter learners who acquired new skills simply through doing them. The
people we today diagnose as having Asperger Syndrome could back then have been
thought of as the thinkers who found new solutions to problems. As Temple
Grandin once said, “Who do you think made the first stone spear? That wasn't
the yakkity yaks sitting around the campfire. It was some Asperger sitting in
the back of a cave figuring out how to chip rocks into spearheads.” Strength
through diversity isn’t just a political correctness banner, it’s evolutionary
fact.

On the other hand, tribal life meant competition and
aggression from other tribes. This has left us with a strong fear of the
unfamiliar, a desire to protect our status quo and a desperate need to
strengthen our position within a group for fear it will reject us and leave us
at the mercy of others. It’s possible that virtually all forms of prejudice and
discrimination arise from this biological predisposition programmed into us by
evolution. We make racist jokes because we have no connection with the targeted
ethnicity – their ‘not-us-ness’ scare us – and because we hope we’ll get a
laugh from the people we tell them too, making them better friends and less
likely to exclude us.

It could be argued that the greatest contradiction of the evolved
brain, however, is that it’s infinitely more complicated than perhaps it really
needs to be, at least so far as survival within a tribe is concerned. Perhaps
the original advantage brought about by its key distinguishing property – consciousness;
awareness of self – is that it enabled us to step outside of our bodies
mentally and, through this, gain a better understanding of the wider world
around us: crucial for solving problems that require more than just instinctive
knowledge. Out of this ability, however, came a whole set of other skills and
properties, such as that of empathy, aesthetic appreciation and sense of
identity. The more we’ve become conscious of social variation around us, the
more we’ve sought to determine our own place within it.

In SL, the two places where we can give a first glance,
‘snapshot’ sense of our identity to others is through our avatar appearance and
our profile. As I indicated earlier, the degree to which we use our profile as
an identity tool varies from person to person and our individual usage also
varies over time. The same could pretty much be said of avatar appearance. Huck
has worn the same black shirt and jeans for the best part of a year, I’m
afraid, but you shouldn’t infer from this that my avatar appearance is
unimportant to me. In fact, I do have a range of outfits and when I’m inworld
for more than a few days in a row I do attempt to rotate them. But all of my
outfits still say pretty much the same thing about me: that I’m a quiet,
unassuming guy. My shape says the same thing. Way back when the default male
shape in SL seemed to be a cross between a Greek God of War and an American
Football player, I basically wanted a skinnier, frankly weedier looking avatar.
Years spent in real life not able or wanting to fit in with any sort of
stereotypical alpha male behaviour has left me enthusiastic to express a more
gentle, more intellectual maleness. I’ve had a few AOs over the years too, but
I’ve always eschewed anything with any sort of threatening stand. My current AO
is something of a fidget, always stretching and moving from foot to foot. It
makes me look a little uneasy when I’m amongst a crowd of solid or graceful
standers, which is fine by me because that’s exactly how I do feel amongst
gatherings of people.

This said, however, it would be untrue to claim that these
aspects of my identity are my sole
identity. As I wrote in my very first column for AVENUE, the whole beauty of SL
and its anonymity is that it allows us to explore aspects of ourselves which we
might not have had the courage to explore in real life. There is nothing
preventing us from exploring more than one of these. We can do these in our
existing avatars to a certain extent, however the same anonymity which
facilitates the first online identity can also facilitate the second and the
third and the fourth. I might decide to adopt a whole new writing style and
persona, for example, spend time exaggerating my more eccentric qualities or
live life as a female. For a while in 2011, I contemplated living as a pine
cube with a gender-neutral name, just to see how people responded to someone
where they had no cues whatsoever as to RL gender or lifestyle. One of the
first things you discover in a new identity, after all, is that people respond
to you completely differently. Identity is a socially constructed phenomenon. It’s a two-way thing.

There are plenty of dark sides to this fragmentation of
identity, such as exploring the freedom to express hate views, deliberate
deception or anonymous bullying – all topics I have written about in various
ways over the years. This is by no means by default a peaceful human voyage that
lies ahead of us. Like it or not, however, digital identity is going to be
the big issue of the decades to come and it’s going to be a lot more
complicated than sorting profiles into arbitrary categories. We need to start
getting our heads around this issue and soon.